Tuesday, February 9, 2010

City tearing down housing project

now, for the first time in its 75-year history, the New York City Housing Authority wants to knock down an entire high-rise complex, Prospect Plaza in Brooklyn — a move that has surprised and angered a number of former tenants and advocates for low-income housing.

In the past decade, the authority has chosen to renovate rather than tear down its aging housing stock, often at great expense. Its decision to demolish Prospect Plaza was not the result of a sweeping policy shift, but of the failure of a renovation project that became bogged down in years of administrative, financial and legal problems.

Prospect Plaza — three 12- to 15-story towers in Brownsville — is plagued by neither despair nor poverty: It has been vacant since 2003, when the last tenants were moved out with the promise they could return to refurbished apartments.

One recent evening, the sole occupant of Prospect Plaza — many of the windows on the upper floors have been removed, giving the buildings a hollowed-out look — was a security guard in a ground-floor office. The window frames and doorways on each tower’s bottom three floors were sealed shut with cinderblocks or metal gates. The flagpole was flagless, but an old wooden sign remained: “Welcome to Prospect Plaza.”

Agency officials say they want to tear down the 35-year-old buildings and erect new apartments in their place. Officials initially planned to leave the towers standing and reconfigure the apartments, by eliminating some units to create bigger living rooms and bathrooms, but those plans were scrapped by the authority’s new leadership because demolition made better financial sense.

Ilene Popkin, the agency’s assistant deputy general manager for development, said it would cost $481,000 to renovate each of the 269 apartments. Demolishing the structures and building 361 new units would cost $381,700 per unit. Ms. Popkin and other officials said the three buildings had deteriorated from vandalism and exposure to the elements, and were out of context with the neighborhood. The new apartments — including public and private housing, not only for the poor but also for low- and moderate-income families — are likely to be built in low-rise buildings.

Prospect Plaza originally included four towers housing 1,200 people. One was torn down in 2005; the plan was to use that space for a new community center, shops and additional housing. But today, the building’s old footprint is just a fenced-off lot.

It seems to me that the government is paying way too much to renovate. Almost 500K per apartment.Oops! I forgot, these are politicians that are building,I didn't include the theivery and of course the graft payments.

Housing projects should not be renovated at these numbers 300-400k per - Empty the housing unit and sell the units to outside investors instead where if they bought a unit at 100k and spent 50k to renovate is better than tearing it down. Better yet sell units at much lower prices say at 25K for the smallest units and pay maintenance and sell back unit to housing after 5 years for same purchase price plus 1% after 5 years. This insures affordable ownership and changes the mindset in the building from wards to owners - watch the building blossom.

Leave the Senior Housing developments but I'm all for kicking out the project tenants and developing the land. Make the project dwellers get 2-3 jobs and work hard like the rest of us instead of being aspiring rappers. Even though in their place condos will be built, that's still better than the pj's

Public housing projects, more often than not, were built on the graves of once-beautiful communities. I would not miss them if they were done away with and replaced with housing best fitting the density of their respective surrounding neighborhoods, be they multi-family apartments or single-family houses. For the time being, before any demolition work is done, alternative housing should be built right now on currently vacant lots as a means of relocating people currently living in public housing.

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